As alarm grows over AI-enabled bioweapons—fueled by Anthropic's report on misuse attempts of Claude and Stanford research on AI-designed viral genomes—some scientists argue the danger is overstated. David Bellamy of the Institute of Foundation Models says AI is not a fundamentally new threat, noting that the internet, translation tools, and open science journals already made dangerous biological information accessible long before large language models existed.
Bilal Chughtai, a former Google DeepMind research engineer who left in July 2026, publicly warned that AI could kill everyone and that time may be running out, echoing similar statements from Anthropic's Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger, who put the odds of AI causing human extinction within a decade above 10%. Separately, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said each AI company should be responsible for its own model's safety rather than backing calls for industry-wide coordination, citing legal liability as sufficient incentive and pointing to Meta's delayed release of its Muse AI agent as proof of self-regulation.
An independent bug-hunting security research team exploited Anthropic's Claude AI model to gain unauthorized access to OpenAI's internal code repository. The incident highlights how advanced AI tools can be weaponized to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in rival companies' systems.
Anthropic published a blog outlining measurement standards for tracking AI development pace, revealing that its Claude chatbot now completes most tasks end-to-end from a high-level prompt with human supervision on 26 percent of the company's AI R&D work. The company also said AI performs at least large chunks of work under close human direction on more than 90 percent of its research, though it stressed Claude isn't fully autonomous on any measured task category. The disclosure came alongside proposals for tracking AI agent oversight and compute usage as ways to gauge how fast frontier AI development is progressing.
Anthropic released three metrics measuring AI-driven research progress, human oversight of AI agents, and internal compute allocation, publishing its methodology so other AI labs can adopt similar tracking. The move follows CEO Dario Amodei's weekend call for a coordinated industry slowdown, which drew support from leaders at OpenAI, SpaceX and Google DeepMind. One finding showed roughly 30,000 AI agents simultaneously performing research and engineering tasks on Anthropic's main internal platform.
Jacob Coxon left Anthropic in September 2026, forfeiting unvested equity, after publicly claiming AI researchers privately believe their work could cause human extinction within the decade. Anthropic's alignment lead Evan Hubinger backed the claim, citing his own estimate of over 10% odds of catastrophe within ten years, while Elon Musk dismissed the episode as a publicity stunt. The controversy drew attention to the rationalist-adjacent subculture that has long shaped AI safety discourse in Silicon Valley.
SpaceX has completed a record-breaking IPO, and reports indicate Anthropic is targeting a valuation of $2 trillion or more for its own public offering, with OpenAI also considering going public. Together these potential listings could rank among the largest in market history and significantly influence how capital flows through public markets.
Major AI companies, alarmed by reports of rogue AI agent behavior and warnings from a departing Anthropic engineer, have proposed a joint 'slowdown' in AI development to address safety risks. Legal experts note that describing this as a coordinated pause could itself trigger antitrust scrutiny under the Sherman Act, since agreements among competitors to limit output are traditionally viewed with suspicion by regulators.
At Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, CEO Marc Benioff touted projected 2027 revenue of over $46 billion driven by AI products, even as attendees grappled with a growing rift among tech leaders over AI safety. The disagreement followed Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation and public warning that companies pursuing self-improving AI were taking reckless risks, prompting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and even OpenAI's Sam Altman to call for slowing AI's pace. White House adviser David Sacks and President Trump dismissed these existential risk concerns, with Trump labeling them a hoax.
The House of Representatives left Washington on Wednesday, effectively delaying any legislative response to mounting warnings about artificial intelligence risks until after the November midterms. Speaker Mike Johnson canceled planned Thursday work, telling reporters lawmakers needed to return home to campaign, and pointed to the Senate to take up any AI legislation instead. The move comes despite pleas from executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI for federal oversight after an Anthropic researcher's resignation warning about AI's existential dangers.
King Charles III hosted a closed-door meeting at Dumfries House with AI industry figures including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, executives from OpenAI and Anthropic, DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and UK officials including new AI minister Kanishka Narayan. He urged attendees to rein in artificial intelligence before it becomes uncontrollable, warning that the technology could develop darker capabilities beyond its benefits to medicine and science.
Anthropic has rebuilt the 'projects' concept inside Claude Code, giving cloud-based sessions persistent threads, shared memory, and the ability for Claude to coordinate multiple parallel work streams on its own. The upgrade is initially limited to select Pro and Max subscribers using cloud sessions who have no existing projects, while local, terminal-based workflows are excluded from the new system entirely.
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